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You did and will keep getting downvoted (like my comment below about GIMP's usability will), but you're absolutely right. This is another case where developers

You did and will keep getting downvoted (like my comment below about GIMP's usability will), but you're absolutely right. This is another case where developers decide what's cool, and of course pick features that are cool to them, not their users. Not once in my life would I ever think I'm missing that feature in GIMP.

avian 9y ago
Did you stop to think that perhaps GIMP's developers are in fact its users? I'm an engineer and I draw as a hobby. I don't mind developer-oriented features in my drawing program. If I wanted Photoshop, I would be using that.
- Karunamon 9y ago
  That’s all well and good, but if GIMP is targeting devs first who are also artists, Linux remains an OS without an image editor targeted at artists first. IMO that’s an important hole in the software library that prevents wider adoption.
  - callahad 9y ago
    Krita (https://krita.org https://krita.org) is 12 years old, and just released version 4.0 last week. HN comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16647445 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16647445
    - gilrain 9y ago
      And if you complain that Krita lacks photo manipulation features, you're told "Of course, because Krita is only targeted at illustrators!" The open source evangelists always have a dodge.
      - zzzcpan 9y ago
        Inkscape, mypaint and gimp is pretty much all there is to use professionally on linux. And they complement each other surprisingly well. Inkscape is the main workhorse, mypaint is for sketches and gimp is to prepare some photos and raster images to import into inkscape (you can't do a lot in gimp).
        slantyyz 9y ago
        It's been a while since I've used Inkscape to import .ai files, but does Inkscape still have a tendency to mangle them when you try to import them? If you're moving from one platform to another, you want legacy files to import perfectly, especially when you don't have time to convert old Illustrator assets into svg files. On Mac/Windows at least, Affinity Designer was the first app around $50 or under that didn't mangle any of the .ai files I threw at it.
        zzzcpan 9y ago
        Yes, you still need to convert to svg for the best result. These things will always be fragile.
      - lovelearning 9y ago
        What's with the entitlement here? These are people sacrificing their time and going largely unpaid (AFAIK) for their efforts. I for one am happy and grateful that these "dodgy" open source evangelists exist and offer us all a choice for free. If I have a subjective usability problem with their software, far more constructive to take the effort to try and fix it myself than complain like a diva.
        gilrain 9y ago
        The "entitlement" is from people who are frustrated that the open source software movement lacks such a fundamental piece of the desktop software puzzle. The confrontation comes from the fact that one side insists the software is there (GIMP), whereas the other side view them as disconnected from reality since its use in industry rounds to 0%.
        lovelearning 9y ago
        I don't see why perceived usage share in industry should motivate dissing open source devs. GIMP has a user base and fans who obviously think it's good enough for their needs. If the professionals in the industry and their employers have a need for an all-in-one free software that can do everything - image editing, illustrations, maybe throw in 3D and animations while we are at it - then the industry should contribute towards building it. All the building blocks are available, thanks to those dodgy open source devs.
        Karunamon 9y ago
        What can be and what is are two different things. GIMP is not a serious competitor to Photoshop, full stop. So long as there is no serious competitor to Photoshop, that's a huge swath of the professional world (and much of the non-professional) that won't ever give Linux the time of day. There's a reason that Photoshop is teetering dangerously close to being a genercised trademark! And I think the attitude comes in when GIMP is ignorantly held up as if it were a serious competitor. It isn't. It's something else entirely. It might be good enough for people to make memes for internet shitposting, but between the missing features and the alien UI (to the point where a massive reskin [1] was around for a while), it's never going to be used in industry. If the GIMP devs want to continue down this path, more power to 'em, I just want the people claiming that it's a Photoshop competitor to educate themselves :) [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIMPshop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIMPshop
      - callahad 9y ago
        And that's a completely legitimate response. Krita is targeted at artists and illustrators, just like any other specialized tool. People don't look at Vim and complain that lacks desktop publishing features, despite novelists and programmers both needing to manipulate text. The original complaint regarded tools for artists, and that's Krita. For photographers, there's DarkTable (https://www.darktable.org/ https://www.darktable.org/), RawTherapee (http://www.rawtherapee.com/ http://www.rawtherapee.com/), and many others. For my modest needs, I find DigiKam (and occasionally The GIMP) adequate, though I am envious of proprietary tools.
        gilrain 9y ago
        And when we complain about usability issues and lack of features in those programs (such as GIMP!), we're told that there are lots of open source alternatives; for instance, look how slick Krita is! And thus the cyclical debate continues for another turn while a competitive raster editor remains unavailable in the open source ecosystem.
        prokoudine 9y ago
        No, when you complain about usability issues in GIMP to _me_, I actually listen and make notes. Some of these notes end up in the bug tracker. But not, and I repeat -- not when complaints are made in demanding and offensive tone, without providing useful feedback.
        gilrain 9y ago
        If you discard feedback based on tone, you will very obviously bias yourself toward only accepting positive or positive-leaning feedback. I'm sure you can see how that would seriously hinder software quality in the long run. And, indeed, we can see that it has in the case of GIMP.
        prokoudine 9y ago
        You kinda missed the part where I mention tone _and_ lack of useful feedback.
    - nkkollaw 9y ago
      Krita is great, but maybe more for drawing. I think Pinta is a really good software for artists.
    - prokoudine 9y ago
      > Krita (https://krita.org https://krita.org) is 12 years old No, it's not :) "At the 31st of May, 1999, the KImageShop project officially kicked off with a mail by Matthias Elter." From the very website you linked to :)
      - callahad 9y ago
        Hah! I blame the Wikipedia sidebar, which claims the initial release was 21st June, 2005: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krita https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krita :)
        prokoudine 9y ago
        Yeah, Krita's naming history is a tad convoluted. Still, a truly amazing project.
  - aoloe 9y ago
    mypaint (http://mypaint.org http://mypaint.org) is like krita but for the hobby painters...
  - CorpusCalcium 9y ago
    Very few people can devote the significant time necessary to make free professional-grade stuff just for the sake of a wider audience. And unless you're an artist who does that yourself, it's a bit much to ask others to meet your needs for free like that in the first place. If non-dev artists want to see that gap close, they need to contribute, not just wait for mana from heaven. No, that doesn't have to mean actually writing the software. But it could mean paying someone else to do the coding, even if the software is ultimately released as OSS.
- bitwize 9y ago
  You may not mind developer-oriented features, but the vast, vast majority of artists do. This is why Photoshop wins. Adobe has customers, and Photoshop's devs have to either listen to the customers, or be fired.
  - seba_dos1 9y ago
    Which is exactly why a feature like the one we're discussing has been included in Photoshop for ages, along with stuff like custom swap space management for image buffers? :P
  - paulie_a 9y ago
    Last time I checked, Photoshop and most of adobe's products barely function on a 4k device, yet Gimp works nicely. It's astounding that a company that makes graphics software can't support modern hardware at all. But I guess they are the company that can't fix the tremendous piece of shit known as flash
    - bkor 9y ago
      > Last time I checked, Photoshop and most of adobe's products barely function on a 4k device, yet Gimp works nicely. That's a surprise and nice to hear! I thought the support wasn't too great and it requires GTK+3.x or newer. It still uses GTK+2.x (see https://wiki.gimp.org/wiki/Roadmap https://wiki.gimp.org/wiki/Roadmap).
      - seba_dos1 9y ago
        There are some shortcomings on the UI side (you need to take care of DPI setting for starters, and you also need to configure some details separately to have usable button sizes for instance), but I'm using it on GNU/Linux with 3200x1800 13" screen and works just fine.
- nkkollaw 9y ago
  > Did you stop to think that perhaps GIMP's developers are in fact its users? GIMP's users aren't the handful of developers who develop GIMP. GIMP's users would be people that switch to Linux and are looking for an alternative to Photoshop. GIMP is for some reason referred to them as the go-to for image manipulation on Linux so they try it, and when they can't use it they either install Photoshop via Wine or go back to Windows. I don't know why people recommend GIMP instead of Pinta or more usable software, honestly.
  - prokoudine 9y ago
    > I don't know why people recommend GIMP instead of Pinta or more usable software, honestly. Try adding a text line, then editing it. See if you still want to recommend Pinta. I absolutely love the idea of having a simple image editor for users who don't need most GIMP features. Pinta devs got quite a few things right, but it needs SO much more work...
detaro 9y ago
With that logic, you can argue against any debugging facility in software. Log files? Only developers think those are cool, useless! FWIW, I have missed better tools for performance tweaking in competing (Adobe) products, so while I don't know if the one in GIMP would be useful, I can see why one would want something like it even as an end user.
- nkkollaw 9y ago
  > With that logic, you can argue against any debugging facility in software. Log files? Only developers think those are cool, useless! Log files aren't user-facing. A performance meter in an image editing program is completely useless to 99% of its users.
  - detaro 9y ago
    So performance tools are fine, as long as they are hard to find (=not user-facing)? And the percentage of users that would want them has to live with worse access to them to not scare the others with an extra menu entry?
    - nkkollaw 9y ago
      Yes. The more commonly used features are, the more prominent they should be in the UI. If not, the "Compose" or "Send" button in email clients should be as big as "view connection details" (to give you an example). That's how you reduce clutter. GIMP does that horribly, so they should probably _remove_ something, not add.
      - prokoudine 9y ago
        The Dashboard dock is user-facing only if the user chooses is to be user-facing. Come on, get a grip on yourself.
prokoudine 9y ago
The feature was developed to help identifying bottlenecks in how GIMP uses cache. It was added to make GIMP faster. Do you want GIMP to be slower?
- nkkollaw 9y ago
  Kind of a contorted way of seeing this, but I'll go for it. So, as a user I have to identify bottlenecks, now..? That would be my first question. Since you're implying that by not thinking the performance indicator is an important feature for the average user I want GIMP to be slower, yes--actually I would definitely opt for a slower, usable program than a fast unusable one, and I never thought speed was a problem of GIMP. Right now I'm running Wine to be able to edit this PSD file without going crazy trying to use GIMP's interface, so obviously speed is not what I care about. I'm sure I'm not the only one, since other problems and not speed seem to be stopping people from using GIMP as their image editor.
  - prokoudine 9y ago
    > So, as a user I have to identify bottlenecks, now..? That would be my first question. Please do pay attention. The release notes specifically describe who did that and for what purpose, and what's in it for end-users. It's all there for you to read. Just please pay attention. > and I never thought speed was a problem of GIMP Which suggests that you never used such a basic feature as Gaussian blur in both Photoshop and GIMP. GIMP _is_ slower than it should be. It actually _is_ a problem for people with modern DSLRs. We want to fix that problem.
    - zzzcpan 9y ago
      Exactly. As someone who did use Photoshop professionally for years, I got used to Gimp's quirks in like a few days, but hit the performance wall right after that. Pretty much nothing I did in Photoshop is possible in Gimp due to performance issues.
    - nkkollaw 9y ago
      Are _you_ paying attention (your tone is absolutely horrible, by the way)? I'm saying that I doubt the project's priorities are in line with those of its users. Are you sure that performance is a problem for most users? I have talked to people about GIMP before, and it came out 0 times, while usability was the problem that forced most people to install Photoshop or go back to Windows. In the past 3 days, I've opened pretty big illustrations (about 20,000px* 8000px) on a i35 thinker (mobile phone processor), and I had absolutely no problem opening them, scrolling around, etc. Doing basic operations like moving, cropping, and resizing layers was so cumbersome that after 3 days I gave up and installed Photoshop 7.

avian 9y ago

Did you stop to think that perhaps GIMP's developers are in fact its users? I'm an engineer and I draw as a hobby. I don't mind developer-oriented features in my drawing program. If I wanted Photoshop, I would be using that.

Karunamon 9y ago
That’s all well and good, but if GIMP is targeting devs first who are also artists, Linux remains an OS without an image editor targeted at artists first. IMO that’s an important hole in the software library that prevents wider adoption.
- callahad 9y ago
  Krita (https://krita.org https://krita.org) is 12 years old, and just released version 4.0 last week. HN comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16647445 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16647445
  - gilrain 9y ago
    And if you complain that Krita lacks photo manipulation features, you're told "Of course, because Krita is only targeted at illustrators!" The open source evangelists always have a dodge.
    - zzzcpan 9y ago
      Inkscape, mypaint and gimp is pretty much all there is to use professionally on linux. And they complement each other surprisingly well. Inkscape is the main workhorse, mypaint is for sketches and gimp is to prepare some photos and raster images to import into inkscape (you can't do a lot in gimp).
      - slantyyz 9y ago
        It's been a while since I've used Inkscape to import .ai files, but does Inkscape still have a tendency to mangle them when you try to import them? If you're moving from one platform to another, you want legacy files to import perfectly, especially when you don't have time to convert old Illustrator assets into svg files. On Mac/Windows at least, Affinity Designer was the first app around $50 or under that didn't mangle any of the .ai files I threw at it.
        zzzcpan 9y ago
        Yes, you still need to convert to svg for the best result. These things will always be fragile.
    - lovelearning 9y ago
      What's with the entitlement here? These are people sacrificing their time and going largely unpaid (AFAIK) for their efforts. I for one am happy and grateful that these "dodgy" open source evangelists exist and offer us all a choice for free. If I have a subjective usability problem with their software, far more constructive to take the effort to try and fix it myself than complain like a diva.
      - gilrain 9y ago
        The "entitlement" is from people who are frustrated that the open source software movement lacks such a fundamental piece of the desktop software puzzle. The confrontation comes from the fact that one side insists the software is there (GIMP), whereas the other side view them as disconnected from reality since its use in industry rounds to 0%.
        lovelearning 9y ago
        I don't see why perceived usage share in industry should motivate dissing open source devs. GIMP has a user base and fans who obviously think it's good enough for their needs. If the professionals in the industry and their employers have a need for an all-in-one free software that can do everything - image editing, illustrations, maybe throw in 3D and animations while we are at it - then the industry should contribute towards building it. All the building blocks are available, thanks to those dodgy open source devs.
        Karunamon 9y ago
        What can be and what is are two different things. GIMP is not a serious competitor to Photoshop, full stop. So long as there is no serious competitor to Photoshop, that's a huge swath of the professional world (and much of the non-professional) that won't ever give Linux the time of day. There's a reason that Photoshop is teetering dangerously close to being a genercised trademark! And I think the attitude comes in when GIMP is ignorantly held up as if it were a serious competitor. It isn't. It's something else entirely. It might be good enough for people to make memes for internet shitposting, but between the missing features and the alien UI (to the point where a massive reskin [1] was around for a while), it's never going to be used in industry. If the GIMP devs want to continue down this path, more power to 'em, I just want the people claiming that it's a Photoshop competitor to educate themselves :) [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIMPshop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIMPshop
    - callahad 9y ago
      And that's a completely legitimate response. Krita is targeted at artists and illustrators, just like any other specialized tool. People don't look at Vim and complain that lacks desktop publishing features, despite novelists and programmers both needing to manipulate text. The original complaint regarded tools for artists, and that's Krita. For photographers, there's DarkTable (https://www.darktable.org/ https://www.darktable.org/), RawTherapee (http://www.rawtherapee.com/ http://www.rawtherapee.com/), and many others. For my modest needs, I find DigiKam (and occasionally The GIMP) adequate, though I am envious of proprietary tools.
      - gilrain 9y ago
        And when we complain about usability issues and lack of features in those programs (such as GIMP!), we're told that there are lots of open source alternatives; for instance, look how slick Krita is! And thus the cyclical debate continues for another turn while a competitive raster editor remains unavailable in the open source ecosystem.
        prokoudine 9y ago
        No, when you complain about usability issues in GIMP to _me_, I actually listen and make notes. Some of these notes end up in the bug tracker. But not, and I repeat -- not when complaints are made in demanding and offensive tone, without providing useful feedback.
        gilrain 9y ago
        If you discard feedback based on tone, you will very obviously bias yourself toward only accepting positive or positive-leaning feedback. I'm sure you can see how that would seriously hinder software quality in the long run. And, indeed, we can see that it has in the case of GIMP.
        prokoudine 9y ago
        You kinda missed the part where I mention tone _and_ lack of useful feedback.
  - nkkollaw 9y ago
    Krita is great, but maybe more for drawing. I think Pinta is a really good software for artists.
  - prokoudine 9y ago
    > Krita (https://krita.org https://krita.org) is 12 years old No, it's not :) "At the 31st of May, 1999, the KImageShop project officially kicked off with a mail by Matthias Elter." From the very website you linked to :)
    - callahad 9y ago
      Hah! I blame the Wikipedia sidebar, which claims the initial release was 21st June, 2005: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krita https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krita :)
      - prokoudine 9y ago
        Yeah, Krita's naming history is a tad convoluted. Still, a truly amazing project.
- aoloe 9y ago
  mypaint (http://mypaint.org http://mypaint.org) is like krita but for the hobby painters...
- CorpusCalcium 9y ago
  Very few people can devote the significant time necessary to make free professional-grade stuff just for the sake of a wider audience. And unless you're an artist who does that yourself, it's a bit much to ask others to meet your needs for free like that in the first place. If non-dev artists want to see that gap close, they need to contribute, not just wait for mana from heaven. No, that doesn't have to mean actually writing the software. But it could mean paying someone else to do the coding, even if the software is ultimately released as OSS.
bitwize 9y ago
You may not mind developer-oriented features, but the vast, vast majority of artists do. This is why Photoshop wins. Adobe has customers, and Photoshop's devs have to either listen to the customers, or be fired.
- seba_dos1 9y ago
  Which is exactly why a feature like the one we're discussing has been included in Photoshop for ages, along with stuff like custom swap space management for image buffers? :P
- paulie_a 9y ago
  Last time I checked, Photoshop and most of adobe's products barely function on a 4k device, yet Gimp works nicely. It's astounding that a company that makes graphics software can't support modern hardware at all. But I guess they are the company that can't fix the tremendous piece of shit known as flash
  - bkor 9y ago
    > Last time I checked, Photoshop and most of adobe's products barely function on a 4k device, yet Gimp works nicely. That's a surprise and nice to hear! I thought the support wasn't too great and it requires GTK+3.x or newer. It still uses GTK+2.x (see https://wiki.gimp.org/wiki/Roadmap https://wiki.gimp.org/wiki/Roadmap).
    - seba_dos1 9y ago
      There are some shortcomings on the UI side (you need to take care of DPI setting for starters, and you also need to configure some details separately to have usable button sizes for instance), but I'm using it on GNU/Linux with 3200x1800 13" screen and works just fine.
nkkollaw 9y ago
> Did you stop to think that perhaps GIMP's developers are in fact its users? GIMP's users aren't the handful of developers who develop GIMP. GIMP's users would be people that switch to Linux and are looking for an alternative to Photoshop. GIMP is for some reason referred to them as the go-to for image manipulation on Linux so they try it, and when they can't use it they either install Photoshop via Wine or go back to Windows. I don't know why people recommend GIMP instead of Pinta or more usable software, honestly.
- prokoudine 9y ago
  > I don't know why people recommend GIMP instead of Pinta or more usable software, honestly. Try adding a text line, then editing it. See if you still want to recommend Pinta. I absolutely love the idea of having a simple image editor for users who don't need most GIMP features. Pinta devs got quite a few things right, but it needs SO much more work...

detaro 9y ago

With that logic, you can argue against any debugging facility in software. Log files? Only developers think those are cool, useless! FWIW, I have missed better tools for performance tweaking in competing (Adobe) products, so while I don't know if the one in GIMP would be useful, I can see why one would want something like it even as an end user.

nkkollaw 9y ago
> With that logic, you can argue against any debugging facility in software. Log files? Only developers think those are cool, useless! Log files aren't user-facing. A performance meter in an image editing program is completely useless to 99% of its users.
- detaro 9y ago
  So performance tools are fine, as long as they are hard to find (=not user-facing)? And the percentage of users that would want them has to live with worse access to them to not scare the others with an extra menu entry?
  - nkkollaw 9y ago
    Yes. The more commonly used features are, the more prominent they should be in the UI. If not, the "Compose" or "Send" button in email clients should be as big as "view connection details" (to give you an example). That's how you reduce clutter. GIMP does that horribly, so they should probably _remove_ something, not add.
    - prokoudine 9y ago
      The Dashboard dock is user-facing only if the user chooses is to be user-facing. Come on, get a grip on yourself.

prokoudine 9y ago

The feature was developed to help identifying bottlenecks in how GIMP uses cache. It was added to make GIMP faster. Do you want GIMP to be slower?

nkkollaw 9y ago
Kind of a contorted way of seeing this, but I'll go for it. So, as a user I have to identify bottlenecks, now..? That would be my first question. Since you're implying that by not thinking the performance indicator is an important feature for the average user I want GIMP to be slower, yes--actually I would definitely opt for a slower, usable program than a fast unusable one, and I never thought speed was a problem of GIMP. Right now I'm running Wine to be able to edit this PSD file without going crazy trying to use GIMP's interface, so obviously speed is not what I care about. I'm sure I'm not the only one, since other problems and not speed seem to be stopping people from using GIMP as their image editor.
- prokoudine 9y ago
  > So, as a user I have to identify bottlenecks, now..? That would be my first question. Please do pay attention. The release notes specifically describe who did that and for what purpose, and what's in it for end-users. It's all there for you to read. Just please pay attention. > and I never thought speed was a problem of GIMP Which suggests that you never used such a basic feature as Gaussian blur in both Photoshop and GIMP. GIMP _is_ slower than it should be. It actually _is_ a problem for people with modern DSLRs. We want to fix that problem.
  - zzzcpan 9y ago
    Exactly. As someone who did use Photoshop professionally for years, I got used to Gimp's quirks in like a few days, but hit the performance wall right after that. Pretty much nothing I did in Photoshop is possible in Gimp due to performance issues.
  - nkkollaw 9y ago
    Are _you_ paying attention (your tone is absolutely horrible, by the way)? I'm saying that I doubt the project's priorities are in line with those of its users. Are you sure that performance is a problem for most users? I have talked to people about GIMP before, and it came out 0 times, while usability was the problem that forced most people to install Photoshop or go back to Windows. In the past 3 days, I've opened pretty big illustrations (about 20,000px* 8000px) on a i35 thinker (mobile phone processor), and I had absolutely no problem opening them, scrolling around, etc. Doing basic operations like moving, cropping, and resizing layers was so cumbersome that after 3 days I gave up and installed Photoshop 7.